=head1 NAME
Perl6::FAQ::FUD - Fears, Uncertainties and Doubts
=head1 DESCRIPTION
This FAQ addresses common fears and preconceptions that hinders Perl 6
adoption.
=for contributors
When adding questions, please keep in mind:
* No explanations. These can sound through in the responses if needed.
* Simple sentence structures
* Perl 6 has a capital P, and a space before the 6
* Questions end in exclamation points
* Try not to repeat existing questions
=for contributors
When adding responses, please keep in mind:
* If the question was in present tense, Perl 6 is present, Perl 5 is past
* If the question was in future tense, Perl 5 is present, Perl 6 is future
* Don't cloud the explanation with actual Perl 6 code and examples
* This isn't a migration or tutorial document
* Do provide some code if you believe it's an extremely non-scary example
=head2 Perl 6 has too many operators!
Compared to Perl 5, Perl 6 has a few more operators -- and slightly I
precedence levels. This doesn't automatically make the language harder to
learn. Many operators are there to make your life much easier. Many tedious
and error prone loops are no longer needed, and there are operators that are
very easy to learn that let you avoid constructs that are hard to learn.
The number of operators has increased mostly because of some much needed
separation. The single bitwise-OR operator C is now three different
operators: C, C and C|>, operating on strings, numbers and booleans
respectively. That does not mean you have to learn each of them. Their
spelling is very consistent and takes very little learning. It will take less
time to learn the new operators, than to learn how the old ones behaved in all
the different situations.
Perl uses symbols where other languages use words. Either way, to use a
feature, you have to first learn how the feature is spelled. In this respect, a
function with two arguments is just as hard as a symbol, especially if English
is not your native language.
If we say that you can now write C instead of
C, you have learned a new operator in
less than a second, with no effort at all. You can use the new C operator
productively, without the need to know that C is actually a single
I value.
=head2 I will never be able to type Unicode operators!
It is not necessary to type any of the unicode symbols. They all have an
equivalent that is plain ASCII, typable with one of the most limited keyboards
used today: the US QWERTY keyboard. The ASCII variant may be one character more,
but in many cases, it will be easier to type and work exactly the same.
Configuring your system so that you can enter the new pretty glyphs may be hard,
but it is expected to become much easier in the coming years. Some archaic
technology may never be able to let you input these characters, though,
and that's okay.
=head2 Unicode ops cannot be read by me!
A good editor will provide you a way to display the glyphs in other ways, and
you can always choose to convert the source code to ASCII.
=head2 My Perl knowledge will be useless!
Programming isn't a skill of knowing syntax and a bunch of functions. It is a
way of structured thinking. The philosophies behind different languages may
differ, but the way you programmed in Perl 5 is still possible in Perl 6. Just
the spelling changed a little.
Besides that, your Perl 5 knowledge will come in handy the many times that you
encounter legacy Perl 5 code. When Perl 5 was released, there was still Perl 4
code in production, even though very few people had experience with it.
=head2 All my existing code will have to be rewritten!
Perl 5 will be around for as long as you need it. It is free software, not a
subscription. There is no way it can be taken from you. In fact, most new
Perl 6 applications will probably begin with
use perl5:DBI;
and make use of CPAN libraries. Pugs can compile Perl 6 programs into Perl 5
source code, so you can freely experiment with Perl 6 on top of your exsiting
Perl 5 codebase.
If you do not want to have to keep Perl 5 around, the Ponie project aims to
port Perl 5 on Parrot, the new virtual machine designed for Perl 6. Once
Ponie is ready, you can use Perl 5 code in a Perl 6 application, if you want.
If you want it to be real Perl 6 code, you can use an automatic conversion
program that takes your Perl 5 program and turns it into Perl 6. It may
require some manual adjustments afterwards, but most will work automatically.
This is assuming you didn't obfuscate or golf :) And of course, that your code
does not depend on bugs in Perl 5.
To get idiomatic Perl 6, yes, you will need to rewrite the code by hand.
Whether this is worth the effort is up to you to decide. Rest assured
that Perl 5 will not suddenly disappear.
=head2 Perl 6 is hard to learn!
Perl has always been hard to learn. It pays off, though. Perl 6 can do more
than Perl 5, and of course it will take longer to learn all of it. But for a
fair comparison, you have to compare the feature subset of Perl 6 that was
already available in Perl 5. And then you will see that learning the language
will in fact be much easier, because unexpected side effects and changing
symbols have been taken care of.
Many things that required manual fiddling are now automatic. Especially in
object oriented programming, the differences are huge. Perl 5 supported
OOP, but didn't do much to help you write in it. Perl 6 has a very
complete object model. Perl 5 was not well suited for teaching OO to
beginners, because of its explicit complexity when dealing with objects.
Perl 6 aims to be much more usable in academic programming, and for first time
programmers.
=head2 Perl 6 will never be released!
While a release date is purposefully not given, there is no reason to assume
that it will never be released. Building a language that supports all the ways
of programming currently known to man (as well as some entirely new ones)
is challenging and takes a lot of time. Perl 5 has been around for over 15
years, and Perl 6 will also be built to last at least 20.
Note, by the way, that it took all this time since 1987 to get Perl 5 where it
is now. Doing that all over again (the right way, this time) isn't something we
can do in a few dozen months.
=head2 All the Perl documentation will never be rewritten to match Perl 6!
Of course not. There are plenty of old IBM BASIC manuals around, and I'm quite
sure that those have never been rewritten to match current BASIC dialects. Some
books and manuals will be rewritten to match Perl 6, some new ones will be
written from scratch and some will never see a Perl 6 version. As long as all
target audiences get Perl 6 documentation suited to them, this does not have to
be a problem.
The Perl 6 reference documentation (available as C on CPAN) will
probably be rewritten from scratch, in a more structured and beginner friendly
way, but with all the important warnings and side information you have learned
to love from Perl 5.
=head2 A language or VM this powerful can never be fast!
That has been said about almost every new language. The truth is that it all
boils down to machine code eventually, and that this is fast, regardless of
where this came from. The number of layers in between is somewhat important,
but there's no universal rule than something that is powerful has to be slow.
We're not about to invent the rule, either.
Perl 6 is still a compiled language, like Perl 5 was. The VM that executes it
is separated from the rest, but separation doesn't make slow. In fact, it
allows for new optimization techniques that can apply to all the languages
supported by the Parrot VM.
=head2 Perl 6 is not Perl! Perl 6 does not look like Perl!
Perl 6 is not Perl 5 and hence does not look like Perl 5. But ask yourself what
makes Perl be Perl and what makes Perl look like Perl. Sigils, context and
expressive power are what make Perl, and each of these were improved.
=head2 The new features won't be used by people!
This was said about Perl 5 too, when it got object orientation, references and
lexical variables. New features can be very intimidating, but eventually people
do discover their use, and that they're not so hard to get used to.
Not everyone will use every feature, but that too is true for every sane
programming language in existence. This is okay, because without the new
features, Perl 6 is still a great language. If someone uses a loop instead of a
nice hyper operator, that is just another way of doing the same thing.
Many new features make programming much easier, even for beginning programmers
who may not know the details of the new features. It is probably safe to assume
that the majority of new features will be used. If you are really afraid that
they won't, do know that you can play a role in their acceptance. Be active in
the community, show that you are using the new features in intelligent ways,
and others will catch up.
=head2 Perl 6 will not be used as much as Perl 5 was!
=head2 Junctions will be abused!
=head2 The development process will implode into a giant ball of ego and misery!
=head2 Perl 6 will be too much like Haskell!
=head2 Perl 6 has too many features just for completeness, rather than utility!
=head2 Implementing unnecessary features will delay development!
=head2 Perl 6 makes golf (and obfuscation) hard and thus ruin culture!
Please take a look at the F, F and
F directories in the Pugs repository.
=head2 Perl 6 is made for big programs, not for oneliners and short scripts!
=head2 It takes too long to port all CPAN modules!
=head2 I will be three volumes!
=head2 POD will still not support OO and Grammars!
=head2 POD will continue to use visual markup!
=head2 Every module requires 42 "use" statements to improve syntax!
Larry's really bad decisions tend to get fixed later in the design process, we hope.
If you keep using the same modules over and over, you can make a module that uses all
of those modules, and still end up with the things getting exported to the right place.
Individual authors, communities, or style guides could have their own sets.
Most languages (with the possible exception of $your_language_of_choice) have numerous
misdecisions.
In Perl 6 due to the dynamic grammar you can change them.
use Style::JRandom;
use Style::PBP;
use Style::GNU;
=head2 Perl 6 will split into multiple incompatible dialects!
=head2 The internals will be just as inaccessable as Perl 5's!
=head2 The Perl 6 process is driving away too many good developers!
=head2 Perl 6 will not be as portable as Perl 5!
=head2 Perl 6 will not be able to fix the line noise stigma!
=head2 Perl 6 is unnecessary and is hurting Perl 5 development!
=head2 There is too much misinformation surrounding Perl 6!
=cut